Nasa Pioneer Asks For A Leap Of Faith

He was neither pilot, mathematician nor electronics specialist, but Chris Kraft had one of the most awesome jobs in the nation's manned space program until he retired in 1982.

Kraft was the decision-maker who determined whether or not astronauts should be sent aloft from Cape Canaveral, how long they could stay up and flashed the signals that brought them back down again.

"Just before launch, my pulse rate was higher than that of the astronauts," he recently said.

No mission was routine, but Kraft said the most exciting and intensely emotional spaceflight was July 16-20, 1969, when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin landed on the moon.

Though he continued with the space program for more than a decade after that, the experience remains the most profound of his career, Kraft said. "You can't find the heart in the nation today to take the risks that were taken then to obtain our goal.

"It made me proud to be an American. That landing demonstrated what the United States can and will do when driven. I am proud of what this country did in a very tumultuous fashion."

Kraft was born and raised in Phoebus, which is now a part of Hampton. After graduating from Virginia Tech at age 20 with an aeronautical engineering degree, he went to work at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics' Langley site in 1944 as an engineer specializing in aircraft stability.

In 1958, when Langley was chosen as the headquarters of the nation's space program, Kraft was picked by Dr. Robert R. Gilruth to be one of the original members of the Space Task Group, established to manage Project Mercury, the country's first manned space effort. He subsequently developed and trained the flight-control teams for the Mercury spaceflights and several of the Gemini flights.

He was known internationally as the guy on television at Mission Control in Houston, wearing earphones and a microphone while barking orders with a big, black cigar in his mouth.

Kraft, who has given up cigar smoking, now serves as a consultant to Rockwell International Corp., an aerospace contractor. He is also a member of the board of directors of three other businesses in Houston, where he and his wife, Betty, make their home.

Kraft said he never dreamed he'd be involved in putting a man on the moon when he was a student at Virginia Tech.

As a teen-ager, he had a passion for automobile engines. In college he played baseball, and had a .320 batting average as an outfielder.

"If the war hadn't come along, I would probably have been a baseball bum" after college, he said.

When Kraft graduated, World War II was still going strong and he joined the Langley research center staff as an engineer in the flight research division. He worked on the design for the F-8U aircraft, in which U.S. Marine John Glenn would set a coast-to-coast supersonic speed record in 1947.

Eleven years later, the two would meet again when Glenn was selected as one of the Mercury astronauts.

Kraft has compared his job in the space program to a symphony conductor, someone who cannot play all the instruments yet knows how they should sound when played together.

Despite his lack of experience in the scientific details, he succeeded because he possessed one of the keenest intellects in the space program, colleagues said. They said his special gift is the ability to absorb, which was vital in the manned spaceflight business where the margin for error was measured in micromillimeters and microseconds and, Kraft himself said, "each of us had 10 jobs to do."

Kraft demanded top performance from himself and others. When a "bird" was in the air, he spent all of his waking hours in mission control.

His mild-mannered appearance and Tidewater accent changed dramatically when he was at the communications console at Mission Control during flights into space.

With blue eyes snapping, his voice became a rapid staccato. His manner became blunt and somewhat salty when problems developed in flight, but when he finally gave what became a nationwide symbol of success _ "A-OK" _ his eyes twinkled and his mouth would turn up in a delightful smile.

When Gilruth and the top space team was moved from Hampton to Houston in 1961, Kraft went too. He guided the operational planning and conducted mission operations in support of all manned Apollo flights throughout the lunar landing. When Gilruth was transferred to NASA's Washington headquarters in 1972, Kraft became head of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the astronauts are assigned.

Kraft has high praise for Gilruth as a director of the nation's space efforts through the 1960s. Gilruth wasn't in the eye of a television camera often and never received the public recognition he deserved, Kraft said.

The Russians had opened an impressive lead with the first successful manned spaceflights, but by the end of the decade, Gilruth, Kraft and other members of the Space Task Group found the means to surpass them.